Wired’s Observation Desk videos are meant to be quick takes on important issues, which is kind of too bad, because I could listen to Adam Rogers talk all day about ecological post-apocalyptic science fiction and why it matters.

This, I think, is the important takeaway: as Rogers puts it, “We hope that science fiction can be, in some cases, better at teaching us things than science.” By this, I don’t think he means that science fiction communicates the facts better than a biology or climate science textbook, but that fiction can give visceral life to concepts that feel abstract even when they’re clearly laid out with facts and figures that should be intellectually and emotionally comprehensible to us. Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he talks about, does a terrific job of communicating what it is like to ride out a hurricane in insufficiently hardened shelter, and what it’s like to see a landscape we’ve come to know radically rearranged in the aftermath of the storm. Educating people is one thing. Getting them emotionally invested and activated is a second step, one which art is particularly well-suited.

And that’s the reason why I get so frustrated with science fiction that is conceptually lazy or sloppy, or oriented towards spectacle rather than making an idea visceral for the audience. Not everything has to be sober, or substantive, or educational, of course. But I hate watching people make science fiction, in particular, that’s intended to leave the viewer with absolutely nothing, no connection to the things going on around them, when they leave the theater or turn off the television set.

I went to see Ted, Seth MacFarlane’s movie about a man, his talking teddy bear, and the long-suffering woman who usually loves them both, on Friday night, not quite sure what to expect. I’m not an enormous MacFarlane fan—he’s always been someone who doesn’t have a precise or necessarily interesting sense of the distinction between how his characters see themselves and their often-abhorrent behavior and how his shows see them. But I found Ted surprisingly thought-provoking, mostly because of how it illuminates what seems to be a significant and under-acknowledged factor in the slacker-dude movies of the last seven or eight years: class.

John Bennett, the mid-30s rental car slinger Mark Wahlberg plays in Ted is in many ways a stereotypical Bostonian, possessed of the exaggerated bray lots of filmmakers think is inherently hilarious and a wardrobe full of Red Sox garments in a proportion that would be unfathomable to people from outside the region. He’s also a man with what the movie suggests is a limited understanding of race and racial nuance—Ted begins with a made-up Boston tradition of Christian kids gathering to beat up neighborhood Jews on Christmas eve, and John is the kind of man who orders his girlfriend Lori (MacFarlane regular Mila Junis) Cristal at their anniversary dinner because “all those rich black people can’t be wrong.” These are the kinds of exaggerated traits that are a MacFarlane hallmark, whether in the person of Family Guy‘s blinkered patriarch Peter Griffin, or here. But John’s accent and his racial attitudes are class signifiers, as much as his job at a rental car company or the extent to which John feels threatened by Lori’s boss Rex (an unctuous Joel McHale), who thinks that he, not John, can care for Lori properly.

Ted never really has the guts (or the stuffing) to explore that tension. There are hints at it—after John tells Ted he has to move out, Ted works as a checkout clerk at a supermarket, where he meets a woman named Tami-Lynn, and take her on a deeply awkward double date with John and Lori, ruined by Tami’s breach of etiquette. But the movie abandons the question of whether John will be promoted into management at his rental car office or pursue a new, higher-status career in favor of a silly caper plot, and casts Rex as such a villain that there’s no sense that Lori is facing a real or difficult choice between the two men. It’s too bad, because Ted might have been a sharper (and not coincidentally more Bostonian) movie if it had the nerve or the attention span to explore the tension between working-class white communities and the highly educated professional, academic, and creative classes in the region.
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Note: I’m sure y’all have noticed my colleague Travis Waldron’s frequent guest posts in these parts over the past couple of months. Today, I want to announce that we’re making it a regular thing: Travis will be writing here on politics and sports on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. For those of you who don’t know him, his bio and an archive of his other work on ThinkProgress is here. And you can, and should, be following him on Twitter here.

Megan Rapinoe shot to stardom in women’s professional soccer last summer, when her 121st minute cross set up an improbable game-tying goal in the waning seconds of the U.S. Women’s National Team’s World Cup victory over Brazil. Rapinoe and her teammates will begin their run toward a gold medal at the London Olympics later this month, but what has Rapinoe in the headlines again isn’t her soccer — it’s that as of last week, she is now perhaps America’s most prominent openly gay athlete.

Though the news has certainly made headlines, it has not shocked the sports world the way a similar revelation from a male athlete would. “An openly gay female athlete almost isn’t news,” Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky wrote. “A lesbian in the locker room conforms to a stereotype, just as a straight male athlete is a stereotype.”

This perception, however, that there is an abundance of openly gay female athletes — that the assumption that so many female athletes are gay makes it easier for them to come out if they are — is almost entirely incorrect. It is certainly news, and welcome news for those who support equality in sports.

The stereotyping of female athletes as inherently gay may actually make it harder for women, as in the past, they helped create “an amazing division between lesbians and straight women in sports,” Dr. Pat Griffin, a professor and advocate for LGBT rights in sports, told the Journal for the Study of Sports and Athletes in Education. “I think straight women historically have been very concerned with the image of sports and being tagged with the lesbian label, which has lead to a lot of division among woman in sports.”

Those divisions, Griffin says, are beginning to fade, and for Rapinoe, many difficulties that face other athletes didn’t exist. She has been open with teammates and others in the sport about her relationship with Australian soccer player Sarah Walsh, and she made her announcement now only because someone finally bothered to ask.

That doesn’t mean women have it easy, though. In college sports, female coaches who are gay or thought to be are often the subject of ugly smears on the recruiting trail. Former University of San Diego coach Kathy Marpe, for instance, closeted her homosexuality throughout her 25-year career because she feared it would cost her recruits; on multiple occasions, she told ESPN, rumors about her sexuality did just that. Other coaches preach “family values” as code for the heterosexuality of their programs. “The takeaway for coaches is clear: Be straight, or, at the very least, act straight,” ESPN’s Luke Cyphers and Kate Fagan wrote. Too many female athletes face the same dilemma — some are encouraged to stay in the closet to avoid confirming stereotypes, others live their sexual lives in the shadows, scared of the reaction they may receive.

It’s no wonder then, that the most prominent openly gay female athletes are almost all retired, much like the only openly gay male athletes in major American professional sports came out only after their careers ended. It has certainly gotten easier for an athlete like Rapinoe to openly acknowledge her sexuality. That it may be easier for a female athlete, however, doesn’t make it easy, and it certainly doesn’t mean the world of women’s sports is the open, tolerant place we often imagine it to be.

The bridge is yours.

-I agree with David Denby that American movies could use sharper dialogue, but not with anything else he has to say about The Newsroom.

-The next Old Man’s War novel will be released as a serial.

-I am getting more excited for Pacific Rim with every new bit of information we get about it.

-Actors and their doubles.

-”Sweet Life,” from Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange:

The Wall Street Journal reports that, just as was the case after the death of Osama bin Laden when movie projects on the subject became hot Hollywood currency, a number of studios are contemplating biopics about Julian Assange. The Wikileaks founder’s story is undoubtedly commercially compelling, whether someone’s looking to make a technological thriller with more realistic politics than Hackers, a movie about indefinite detention, given the consequences Bradley Manning has faced for giving documents to Assange, or a spy-ish picture that raises more intelligent questions about the impact and viability of government secrecy. Any and all of those movies would be fascinating things to see Hollywood try to attempt, though the results would inevitably vary.

But I’m honestly curious to see if any of the studios in contention here are going to focus on the sexual assault charges against Assange, and if so, how they’ll handle them. Assange has always seemed like a fascinating case for how powerful people prioritize the treatment of women and the abuse of them by powerful men when other issues they care about are at stake. If you support Assange’s work, as filmmakers like Michael Moore and Ken Loach, who put up bail money for him in his sexual assault case did, that does not mean he’s incapable of committing assault, that the charisma that won Assange supporters also rendered his negotiations of consent with women he had sex with clear and uncomplicated. Trying to balance the presumption of innocence and the idea that rape victims, who are particularly subject to discrediting and shaming when they come forward, deserve respect and the opportunity for a fair hearing is something that appears difficult enough for our society. A case like Assange’s, in which some of his famous supporters often couldn’t stop at asserting his right to a presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial, heightens that challenge, plays it out on an international scale. A movie that can even lay out those issues cogently, much less suggesting any sort of solution, would be a real accomplishment.

Last summer, I did a couple of Q&As with some of my favorite web comics artists, Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots and Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. Specifically, I was interested in how both of them planned to handle the somewhat arrested developments of their main characters, writer-cum-liquor-store employee Hazel in Girls With Slingshots, and low-level librarian Marten Reed in Questionable Content.

At the time, Corsetto said that “Most of the horrible things that happen to my characters are a means of developing themselves for their audience. I mean, I’m sure that in their off-panel lives they’re laughing, crying, getting into trouble, and having life-changing moments, but those moments aren’t disclosed in the comic until you’ve been thoroughly acquainted with the characters. When you meet someone for the first time, you generally don’t know much about them until they’re made vulnerable in a situation.” And Jeph explained that:

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23! But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I bring this up now because I think both comics have done a particularly impressive job moving their characters forward in the past year. In Girls With Slingshots, Hazel’s come up against one of the most common and painful dilemmas of your twenties: the end stages of a relationship where the parties love each other deeply but are fundamentally incompatible. Corsetto’s done a lovely job of inverting the standard emotional lineup here (and to a certain extent, upending the Judd Apatovian vision of dude slackers), making Hazel the irresponsible, undirected, uncommunicative half of the couple. Zach knows he wants to get married, he’s moved into a place he’d like to share with Hazel but only if she’s willing to accept the emotional attachment that, for Zach, comes with that step. He may not have a fancy career plan, but he has a solid one, building up revenue from his taxi business and considering expanding it. Hazel, by contrast, is letting her writing talent languish, whether out of fear or laziness. She’s not contributing much to her site with Thea, working instead at a liquor store, a dead-end choice that fuels her increasingly worrisome drinking habit. I’ve been impressed with how unlikable Corsetto’s been willing to make Hazel, and how painful she’s managed to make Hazel and Zach’s breakup within the context of a fundamentally funny, warm comic. Hazel is someone who doesn’t absorb new information or change easily, and it takes confidence in the comic to upend its tone and dynamics to make the prospect of Hazel’s evolution feel realistic and deeply necessary.

Jacques has taken a somewhat lighter hand with Marten, whose flaws are perhaps less pronounced than Hazel’s, but whose inertia is impressive. A recent arc in which Marten is forced to give the Smif library’s new interns an orientation tour revealed, in a funny and sympathetic way, how much he’s learned, and how much he doesn’t actually know about what he’s doing. While Corsetto’s tackled a well-documented facet of a lot of people’s twenties, Jacques is taking on one of the big secrets: that it can take a really long time to figure out what you like doing, what you’re good at, and the even narrower subset of things that overlap those two disparate categories. It’s a process that often involves compromise, and definitely involves courage when you decide to change course.

To a certain extent, I’ve grown up with Hazel and Marten—I started out younger than both of them, and have grown past them as time moves faster in the real world than in the strips. It’s been a real privilege to have Corsetto and Jacques tell stories about people my age that are as good as these. And television networks looking for the next great show about twenty-somethings could do worse than to consider adapting these wonderful, evolving stories.

Next week, we’ll finish the first season of The Wire. As always, if you want to discuss beyond the episodes we’re covering here, please label your comments for newbies.

There are a lot of things that take place in episodes ten and eleven of The Wire: the beginning of Bubbles’ attempts to get clean, Wallace’s inability to escape the pit completely, and Omar’s Proposition Joe-brokered parlay with Stringer Bell. But all of these threads pale in comparison to Kima’s shooting, the finest long setpiece The Wire put together in its first season, and one of the most impressive things it does in the entire run of the show.

The Wire is obsessed with hands—they take the place of faces in the credits sequences, dominate the opening of the pilot, and give characters like Bubbles their characteristic physical tics (in his case, straightening the buttons on his shirts). And it’s what characters do with their hands that tells us how deeply they are feeling about Kima’s shooting in the light of duty. After Daniels and McNulty remove Kima from the car, Carver crouches on the ground, his hands on his head—we can’t hear if he’s keening or screaming or crying, but it’s clear he needs to physically hold himself together. Landsman’s hands are up in the air as he tries to communicate to Rawls what he needs after the scene is swarmed by representatives of other departments. At the hospital, Daniels’ hand covers his mouth as his eyes flicker open and closed, an act of control that prevents him from speaking in any way that might be over control. And after Bubbles is beaten in interrogation by detectives who believe he must have had something to do with Kima’s shooting, which no one has bothered to tell him about, he covers his eyes as he demands to “I want to talk to Detective Greggs…To McNutty, then. This shit ain’t right.” He’s been abused and humiliated by these men, and is about to be dealt a worse blow by McNulty, who will ask him to go back to the places he used to cop in Kima’s service, but he will not let his tormenters see his reaction. Bubbles can deny them that, at least.

So much of this eleventh episode of The Wire is also about a failure—or a refusal—to see. Bubbles is only one victim of mistaken identity. The police commissioner walks up to the white detective working Kima’s shooting, and assuming he’s Daniels, who is standing right there, “Lieutenant, I know just how you feel. This is the toughest job a police commissioner has to do. I’ll never get used to it.” When Carver goes to Kima and Cheryl’s house to deliver the bad news to his partner’s partner, Cheryl assumes he’s a random visitor or perhaps a workman: she misses that he’s come to see her because she doesn’t read Carver as a cop. Once they’re at the hospital, in attempting to explain that Kima’s family is another woman, Carver stumbles for the words to make Burrell understand. “Officer Griggs has a girl?” Burrell asks, confused. It’s Daniels who steps in with a convenient evasion, telling him that Kima has “A roommate. The family’s in Richmond. Driving up first thing today.” Cheryl, forgotten in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, overlooked in the waiting room, is rendered emotionally invisible by the need to keep Burrell comfortable.
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